
Pál Kitaibel (3 February 1757 – 13 December 1817) was a
Hungarian botanist
Botany, also called plant science, is the branch of natural science and biology studying plants, especially Plant anatomy, their anatomy, Plant taxonomy, taxonomy, and Plant ecology, ecology. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who s ...
and chemist.
He was born at
Nagymarton (today Mattersburg, Austria) and studied botany and chemistry at the University of
Buda
Buda (, ) is the part of Budapest, the capital city of Hungary, that lies on the western bank of the Danube. Historically, “Buda” referred only to the royal walled city on Castle Hill (), which was constructed by Béla IV between 1247 and ...
. In 1794 he became Professor and taught these subjects at
Pest. As well as studying the flora and hydrography of Hungary, in 1789 he discovered the element
tellurium
Tellurium is a chemical element; it has symbol Te and atomic number 52. It is a brittle, mildly toxic, rare, silver-white metalloid. Tellurium is chemically related to selenium and sulfur, all three of which are chalcogens. It is occasionally fou ...
, but later gave the credit to
Franz-Joseph Müller von Reichenstein (1740–1825) who had actually discovered it in 1782.
Together with
Franz de Paula Adam von Waldstein (1759–1823), he wrote ''Descriptiones et icones plantarum rariorum Hungariae'' ("Descriptions and pictures of the rare plants of Hungary"; M. A. Schmidt, Vienna, three volumes, 1802–1812). In this work he made the first description of
''Nymphaea lotus'' var. ''thermalis''.
He died in 1817 at
Pest.
The genus ''
Kitaibelia'' of
mallows was named after him by
Carl Ludwig von Willdenow
Carl Ludwig Willdenow (22 August 1765 – 10 July 1812) was a German botanist, pharmacist, and plant taxonomist. He is considered one of the founders of phytogeography, the study of the geographic distribution of plants. Willdenow was also ...
.
Species named after him:
* ''
Ablepharus kitaibelii''
[Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). ''The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. . ("Kitaibel", p. 142).]
* ''
Cardamine kitaibelii''
* ''
Kitaibela vitifolia''
* ''
Knautia kitaibelii''
* ''
Aquilegia kitaibelii''
References
External links
Biography in HungarianPlants named for Kitaibel at IPNI
Bibliography
Books by and about Paul Kitaibel on Worldcat.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kitaibel, Pal
19th-century Hungarian botanists
Botanists from the Austrian Empire
Hungarian chemists
18th-century Hungarian botanists
People from Mattersburg District
1757 births
1817 deaths